Monday, February 24, 2020

An "author" named Admin posted over 1,000
articles in seven languages in two weeks.

Earlier this month, Google sent me several notifications for an article entitled "The Internet Is Widely Accessible in Cuba. Why Is the US Insisting It Isn’t?" I checked it out and found that Reese Erlich had posted it on Truthout.org, a left-leaning Web site, on February 12. On the 13th, Cabasi.com published a shortened version of the article and Salon.com published the original version on the 17th. These were all in English and both Salon and Cubasi credited Truthout.

I also received notification of an article entitled "Internet es ampliamente accesible en Cuba. ¿Por qué Estados Unidos insiste en que no lo es?" that was published February 13 at DiarioDeLatinos.com.

It turns out that DiarioDeLatinos also published English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian versions of the same article on the 13th. The seven versions of the article were all written by the same author, Admin, with a little help from Google Translate, which rendered "New York Times" as "New York Instances" in the first paragraph. Admin is prolific -- he or she had posted 1,072 articles on DiarioDeLatinos.com as of the morning of February 18th and DiarioDeLatinos.com was registered on February 4th. The registrant organization is Domains By Proxy, LLC, which is located at the GoDaddy Headquarters building in Scottsdale, Arizona:

Private domain registration is reminiscent of banks facilitating money laundering. I wonder what else Domains By Proxy is hiding.

Finally, I took a look at what the censors at Cubasi deleted when they edited the original article. They cut mention of tools like the Signal encrypted messaging app and VPNs, the fact that Cubans can download El Nuevo Herald, and Cuba’s blocking of Web sites. They also deleted references to dissidents like Yoani Sanchez or Ladies in White and admissions that only 38 percent of Cubans are connected to the web compared to 70 percent for all of Latin America, 3G wireless is being installed in Cuba while much of the world is switching over to 5G, Cuba lacks convertible currency, Cubans don’t have the bandwidth to stream video and El Paquete is “by far” the most popular technology for Cubans.

This was not Cuba's first foray into online propaganda. In 2013, Eliécer Ávila described Operation Truth in which 1,000 university students were writing social media posts favoring the government and working as "trolls," disrupting discussion and attacking those who question the government and last month Granma posted a propaganda/conspiracy article about US subversion.

I wonder how much Internet propaganda the Cuban government sponsored between 2013 and 2020 and I worry about the fact that any government could do the same.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

If the satellite broadband ISP business model pans out, SpaceX and its competitors and their partners, suppliers, and users will create millions of jobs.

Earlier this month Elon Musk tweeted an invitation to a job fair at the new SpaceX production and launch facility near Boca Chica Texas. As shown here, the tweet says they want hard-working, trustworthy people with common sense. They are not looking for specific skills or education, but certain character traits -- "the rest we can train."

That tweet reminded me of hiring practices when I graduated from college. My first professional job was with IBM, but I had no experience with computers or unit-record (punch-card) data processing machines. They interviewed me, gave me an aptitude test and hired me then sent me to school to pick up the skills they needed. At the time, new hires at IBM were enrolled in a two-year, three-phase training program that alternated between classes and field experience. I don't recall the details, but phase one was 8 weeks of full-time training on IBM policy and culture and the programming of unit-record machines. We learned to program computers in phase two. IBM was not unusual -- that sort of training was common in those days.

Postgraduate training programs were particularly necessary for industries that anticipated rapid growth -- like electronic computers then and space launch and Internet service now. For example, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, IBM built the SAGE early-warning network. The Department of Defence spent approximately $8 billion on SAGE, which required IBM to hire and train 3,000 computer programmers, not to mention the people who designed, manufactured, installed, operated and maintained the system and the workers hired by IBM's supply-chain companies. This was just one example of the demand for programmers, salespeople, support technicians, etc. hired and trained by IBM at that time.

SpaceX and its would-be competitors hope to bring broadband connectivity to the roughly 3 billion people who lack Internet access today, rural schools, clinics, markets and businesses, ships at sea, planes in the air, mobile-phone towers, high-speed arbitrage traders on Wall Street, cars, trains, buses, Internet of things sensors and appliances, governments, enterprises, space forces, etc. How long would that take and how many direct, supporting and supply chain jobs -- technical and non-technical -- would have to be created and filled? How many secondary jobs would be needed to serve a couple billion new Internet users?

SpaceX can not do all of that alone. If the satellite broadband ISP business model pans out, SpaceX and the other ISPs, their suppliers, partners and organizations that serve three billion new users will create millions of jobs. Space and renewable energy may keep us employed for years.